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The STS-80 scenes seem to me to be identical in origin to theinfamous STS-48 scenes and to numerous others throughout theshuttle flight program: low-light sensitive B&W cameras aretrained on the receding horizon during night passes, to observeserendipitous lightning events for an experiment calledMesoscale Lightning Experiment, managed out of NASA-MSFC inHuntsville. You can see the dark horizon, the glowing 'air glow'layer, moving stars, moving city lights below, lightningflashes, and under moonlit conditions, dim clouds.

By the way, these low-light B&W cameras are pretty old and arebeing replaced mission by mission -- the suite of camerascarried by a shuttle (one in each corner of the payload bay, twoon the RMS, others perhaps mounted on the keel looking upwardsat target spacecraft, plus a few handheld units inside thecabin) can be adjusted as needed, and a new color CCD camera ismuch higher quality (it doesn't 'bloom' in overbrightreflections, and can't be damaged by sun exposure), but it's notas sensitive in low light, so there are fewer opportunities tosee such views every year.

When sunrise occurs (due to the Orbiter's motion along itsorbit), even though the Orbiter is now bathed in sunlight, thecamera is still trained on the dark side of Earth. But now thefloating particles which routinely accompany every shuttleflight (often ice particles, sometimes junk from the payloadbay, pieces of insulation blankets, a dozen or more distinctlydifferent sources) can become visible in the sunlight, sometimeseven moving into sunlight from the umbra of the Orbiter (andthus "appearing suddenly"). These are close to the camera,sometimes a few feet, at most a few hundred feet. Sometimes theyare hit by pulses of gas from the RCS jets as they automaticallyfire to gently nudge the spaceship back towards a pre-setorientation. Because of the sensitivity of the camera, movingparticles leave streaks -- even stars can be seen to do thiswhen the camera is being panned (usually by command from acontroller in the Mission Control Center). Tumbling particlestend to flash. Bright particles overload the optics and appearas "rings" or "do-nuts" with darker centers.

There's nothing else to it, as far as I can tell. Everyone inthe control center knows about this visual phenomenon, everyonehas seen it numerous times, and they laugh at notions these areanomalous, while they grimace at yet more silly stories bypeople who don't seem to understand much (or do seem tomisunderstand a lot) about "ordinary" space flight.

As far as I was able to determine, these STS-80 scenes wererecorded beginning about 11:55 PM PST on December 1, 1996.That's 07:55 GMT on December 2. Since the shuttle was launchedon Nov 19, that is 324/19:55:47, this makes it about 12 days 11hours 59 minutes "Mission Elapsed Time", or MET. This was on rev197, crossing Venezuela, then the West Indies. The Orbiterattitude was bottom forward, with the vehicle yawed somewhat sothe nose was off to one side.

According to the activity plan sent up that morning, the crewwas doing some evaluation of an EVA tool associated with theirairlock problems, and the two pilots were scheduled to begin areview of landing procedures. Lunch was to follow. When I askedcrewman Story Musgrave, who is not shy about talking aboutanomalies of any kind, he assured me he saw nothing unusual onthe flight, at this point or at any other.

The camera, "B" located at the rear of the payload bay, was in apre-set position which was later changed by ground commands.Judging from the star motion at the horizon, it was lookingsouthwest, not precisely backwards (since then the stars wouldhave been setting straight down across the horizon). I don'thave the exact numbers on the camera's pan/tilt and it's toomuch trouble to get them.

According to a computer reconstruction of the trajectory,sunrise occurred at GMT 07:57. That's precisely when the pictureshows a slight foggy periphery, and when the first objectsappear. They keep showing up until about 08:01, when sunlitclouds come into the camer's field of view and the irisautomatically stops way down so that the tiny objects (and starstoo) are no longer visible. The camera view continues indaylight for long after that.

At MET 12/11:55:47 for example, position is lat 15.07N, Lon62.06W, alt 185.4nm, inertial velocity 25245.6034 ft/sec, theorbital range is 183.8361 to 193.8737 nm, period 91:23.435, betaangle -34 degrees (the sun is off to the right of the orbitalplane by this angle),

The video that I saw over in the Public Affairs Office was tape#612710. If you want to specify it to buy your own copies, givethe MET or GMT times, and order ten minutes before and after theinterval, so you can see the typical phenomena of stars leavingtrails, and auto iris control functioning, and at one point theconstellation Orion going by, and at the end a view around theOrbiter's sunlit payload bay. All very ordinary, unspectacular,normal space views, in my opinion.

I don't know where the impression came from that this was arebroadcast of daily highlights, since these programs areinvariably short (10-15 minutes), with short clips jumping fromscene to scene, usually involving views of astronauts. Thissequence, on the other hand, was continuous for at least 20minutes from the same camera, and the geography and lighting areconsistent with the real time orbital motion. I looked at the"Flight Day Highlights" summary for three days around this dateand that's what they consisted of, with no replay of any ofthese "dancing dots" scenes (why should there have been?).

I don't expect that this will change many minds and I don'tintend to go on television to face some wild accusations thatI'm a paid liar for the grand conspiracy, and basically I don'ttake anyone seriously who takes these stories seriously. Life'stoo short for me to care what some people want to believe thesescenes show. I've already spent too much time, but I figuredsomebody had to make a rational response, whether it wasunderstood and believed, or not.

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